Discover little known histories and explore different notions of the Southeast Asian experience through moving and still images including family home movies, moving and still images from the French colonial era, Hollywood films, and declassified CIA propaganda. This live interactive presentation questions the ideologies and values that frame these images. Beyond the stereotypes, do these images reflect some semblance of Southeast Asian identity? The event is curated by Ina Adele Ray co-presented by Stephen Gong from Center for Asian American Media Memories to Light and Laotian Writer/Poet, Bryan Thao Worra. Featuring an edible Southeast Asian installation by Oauter Sand, Southeast Asian Streetfood Pop-up - SUP! And music provided DJ Richie Traktivist.

Dr. Haing S. Ngor, the only Asian to win the Best Supporting Actor Oscar, for the heartrending role of Cambodian photographer Dith Pran in Roland Joffé’s 1984 film THE KILLING FIELDS. Though he continued acting, Ngor retrained the spotlight on Cambodia, traveling worldwide to speak out against Pol Pot’s regime and the Vietnamese occupation of his country that followed. He became such a powerful voice that specters of conspiracy still haunt his untimely 1996 death. Veteran doc-maker Arthur Dong unspools Ngor’s phenomenal life with original animation, rare archival material and newly shot footage inspired by his autobiography Survival in the Killing Fields. Following the screening, join director Arthur Dong for Q&A.

Director's bio: San Francisco native Arthur Dong’s films includes a trilogy that investigates anti-gay prejudice that was released in the collection, “Stories from the War on Homosexuality,” and features the documentaries Family Fundamentals, Licensed to Kill and Coming Out Under Fire.His films about Chinese Americans were recently released in the follow-up collection, “Stories from Chinese America,” and includes Sewing Woman, Forbidden City, U.S.A.and Hollywood Chinese.

Among Arthur’s over 100 film excellence awards is an Oscar® nomination, three Sundance Film Festival awards, the George Foster Peabody Award, five Emmy nominations, the Berlin Film Festival’s Teddy Award, two GLAAD Media Awards, and Taiwan’s Golden Horse Award. He has also been twice-selected a Rockefeller Fellow in Media Arts as well as a Guggenheim Fellow in Film. Retrospectives of Arthur’s work have been presented at the Human Rights International Film Festival in Warsaw, Poland, the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, the Hawaii International Film Festival, Taipei’s CNEX Documentary Film Festival, and Outfest in Los Angeles.In addition to domestic broadcasts on PBS, the Sundance Channel, and Comcast, his films have been televised in Australia, Brazil, Canada, Finland, France, Germany, Israel, Italy, Japan, the Netherlands, Portugal, Taiwan, and the United Kingdom. Retrospectives of his work have been presented at the Human Rights International Film Festival in Warsaw, Poland, the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, the Hawaii International Film Festival, and Outfest in Los Angeles.

This film about conciliation, connection, and farewell documents Marina Kem‘s search for her father’s story—a father who was strange to her in two regards—strange because of his Cambodian origins, strange because of his silence. Dr. Ottara Kem never spoke of his Cambodian background. But on his deathbed he expressed his desire to be buried in his homeland Cambodia. For his daughter Marina Kem it is the beginning of an intense, poetic and conciliate journey. Tracing the footsteps of his life, she immerses herself deeper and deeper into the history of Cambodia’s ideological wars and at the end she finds a new family and reconciles herself with her roots. Followed by Q&A with director Marina Kem.

Director's bio: Marina Kam lives as an independent author and director in Hamburg. Additionally, she is a founding partner of STERNTAUCHER Filmproduktion. After completing her training and working as a TV reporter, she studied directing at Filmakad- emie Baden-Wuerttemberg from 1996 to 2001, where she studied under the supervision of Franziska Buch Thomas Schadt and Volker Koepp. In 1999 she received the „Caligari“ scholarship. She obtained a diploma with excellence in directing. Her diploma film “Der Wind ist aus Luft”, an essayistic film about happiness, was produced within the framework of the promotional programme “Junger Dokumentarfilm” for screenings at festivals and on Arte. In the year before she had directed “Die Lichtseite des Bewusstseins” for 3sat about hu- man consciousness and in 2002 she directed the documentary “Aus Asche und Staub” for the ARD TV series “Menschen und Straßen”. The film was nominat- ed for the German Camera Award. In 2004 she made the documentary “Safari im Reich der Geister”, which was shot in Benin and produced for Arte and the TV series “Länder Menschen Abenteuer”. While studying, Marina Kem also started writing and directing corporate films for, among others, IBM, Bertels- mann Stiftung and Stage Entertainment. Since 2000 she has made more than 200 corporate films for national and international use, in some of them she was presenting in front of the camera. In 2003 she was a jury member of the then newly founded “Deutscher Dokumentarfilmpreis” (German Documentary Film Award). BONNE NUIT PAPA is her first feature length documentary.

The Look of Silence is Joshua Oppenheimer’s powerful companion piece to the Oscar®-nominated The Act of Killing. Through Oppenheimer’s footage of perpetrators of the 1965 Indonesian genocide, a family of survivors discovers how their son was murdered, as well as the identities of the killers.​​

Director's bio: Born in 1974, USA, Oscar®-nominated film director Joshua Oppenheimer is recipient of a MacArthur “Genius Grant” (2015-2019). His debut feature film, The Act of Killing (2012, 159 min and 117 min), was named Film of the Year in the 2013 by the Guardian and the Sight and Sound Film Poll, and won 72 international awards, including the European Film Award 2013, BAFTA 2014, Asia Pacific Screen Award 2013, Berlinale Audience Award 2013, and Guardian Film Award 2014 for Best Film. It was nominated for the 2014 Academy Award® for Best Documentary, and has been released theatrically in 31 countries. His second film, The Look of Silence (2014, 99 min), premiered In Competition at the 71st Venice Film Festival, where it won five awards including the Grand Jury Prize, the international critics award (FIPRESCI Prize) and the European film critics award (FEDEORA Prize). Since then, The Look of Silence has received the Danish Academy Award for Best Documentary and the prestigious Danish Arts Council Award. It screened at the Telluride Film Festival, Toronto International Film Festival, New York Film Festival, Busan International Film Festival (Best World Documentary), the Copenhagen Documentary Festival (Grand Prize), Festival d’Angers (Audience Award for Best Film), and the Berlin Film Festival (Peace Film Prize). Oppenheimer is a partner at Final Cut for Real in Denmark, and Artistic Director of the Centre for Documentary and Experimental Film at the University of Westminster in London.

Route 3(28 min) is a film a surrealistic and ethnographic account of a newly completed highway in rural Laos. Paid for by Chinese and Thai development funds it is the first modern highway to connecting China to Thailand through the former Golden Triangle. Route 3 has accelerated Chinese development of Lao agricultural, gambling, and prostitution industries, and the migration of rural Lao minority populations to the growing roadside towns. The video considers the enigmatic changes in the visual landscape including the proliferation of hair salons, casinos, and markets for cheap industrial Thai and Chinese products. Continuing the directors’ work with performance and landscape, the film results in a ethno-fantastic panorama of this site. Directors' bio: Exploring what they describe as “the intersection of site and the imaginary,” the work of Patty Chang and David Kelley merges performance, photography, and digital video.

Patty Chang lives and works in Boston. She works with performance, video, narrative, empathy, the unknown and the document. She is a 2014 recipient of the Guggenheim Fellowship and has exhibited her projects both nationally and internationally.

​David Kelley lives and works in Boston and is Assistant Professor of Art at Wellesley College. He works primarily with photography, video and performance. His projects are a hybrid of documentary and ethnographic practices that make use of imaginary, choreographic and performative strategies. A 2010 resident in the Whitney Museum of American Art Independent Study Program, Kelley received an MFA from University of California, Irvine. ​

Cloud of Unknowing ​(30 min) - Commissioned for Singapore’s participation in the 2011 Venice Art Biennale, The Cloud of Unknowing is titled after a fourteenth century mystical treatise on faith, where the cloud paradoxically acts as a metaphor for both an impediment to, and reconciliation with, the unknown or the divine experience.Shot in a decaying block of vacated apartments in the remote outskirts of Singapore, The Cloud of Unknowing is fittingly flooded with ghostly presences. Ethereal clouds infiltrate and invade the homes of the eight characters, culminating in hysterical confrontations with inscrutable specters. Each vignette is based on characters drawn from Western European artworks by such artists as Tintoretto, Caravaggio, Francisco de Zurbarán, Antonio da Correggio, Giovanni Lorenzo Bernini, and René Magritte, as well as the Eastern landscapes of Mi Fu and Wen Zhengming.​This blending of cultural, historical, and philosophical references is prevalent in Nyen’s practice as he speaks to the predicament of representing and interpreting contemporary art discourse through a Southeast Asian lens—more specifically from a Singapore-based perspective (where he was born in 1976). Through this incorporation of Eastern and Western cultural, historical, and philosophical references,The Cloud of Unknowing collapses binaries through a vaporous reinterpretation and integration of cultural narratives.

Ex Utero (15 min) From the artist's statement: "In Ex Utero, I photograph my mother, my aunt, and myself in several configurations, nude from the waist up. In these images, I understand our bodies as archives and as geographies. Bodies hold memory. Bodies, like landscapes, are subject to the politics of division, scarring, removal. An entire generation of women in my family have had breast cancer. Both my mother and my aunt have experienced breast cancer, as has their sister (who was not imaged because she was in the Philippines at the time). Memory is enlivened through a return to our bodies, bodies that have born the journey across the Pacific, who hold the Philippine within themselves and whose images show breasts removed, half-breasts, covered breasts. Interspersed in the video, my mother and aunt speak about the experience of their bodies across the Pacific ocean and how it relates to beauty, loss, affect, women, labor, migration. These moments from interviews are juxtaposed with mammograms and the harsh sound the radiation therapy machine."

Michelle Dizon is an artist based in Los Angeles. Her works take the form of multi-channel video installations, expanded cinema performances, essay films, photographs, discursive platforms, pedagogical experiments, and writing.

Dizon has exhibited and lectured internationally at venues such as the Center for Women’s Studies (Zagreb, Croatia), Caixaforum (Barcelona, Spain), Copenhagen International Documentary Film Festival (Copenhagen, Denmark), Jeu de Paume (Paris, France), IASPIS (Stockholm, Sweden), Metropolitan Museum of Art (Manila, Philippines), Sumaryo Art Space (Jakarta, Indonesia), Vargas Museum (Manila, Philippines), Para/site Art Space (Hong Kong, China), Queens Museum (Queens, United States), Los Angeles County Museum of Art (Los Angeles, United States) and the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts (San Francisco, United States). She earned an MFA in Art with specialization in Interdisciplinary Studio at the University of California, Los Angeles, and a Ph.D. in Rhetoric with designated emphases in Film and Women, Gender, and Sexuality from the University of California, Berkeley.

My name is Asiroh Cham(5 min) ​A young girl named Asiroh is being bullied in school about her unusual name and wants to change it. Her father tells her about their indigenous roots as descendants of the Champa Kingdom and his harrowing escape from the Khmer Rouge. As he recounts this story, the girl's imagination brings the journey to life through her stuffed animals and toys.

​Director's bio: Asiroh Cham was born in a refugee camp in Thailand and belongs to the Cham ethnic group, which was the largest minority to be executed by the Khmer Rouge. With a master’s degree in Asian American studies from UCLA, Asiroh is also a filmmaker and recently received the Linda Mabalot Legacy Scholarship from Visual Communications for her commitment to community justice and social issue documentary.

Cambodia 2099 ( 21 min)

Phnom Penh, Cambodia. On Diamond Island, the country's pinnacle of modernity, two friends tell each other about the dreams they had the night before.

Director's bio: Davy Chou is a French Cambodian filmmaker. He is the grandson of Van Chann, one of the greatest producers in Cambodia in the 1960s and 1970s. His second short film Expired, shot during his first trip to Cambodia in 2008, was selected at Entrevues Belfort International Film Festival 2008. In 2009, Davy Chou created in Phnom Penh a filmmaking workshop with 4 schools and 60 students. The result was a 50-minute collective film named Twin Diamonds that was screened in Cambodia. In October 2009, Davy Chou curated “Golden Reawakening”, a film festival and exhibition about the golden age of Cambodian cinema in the 1960s and the 1970s.

He is the founder of Kon Khmer Koun Khmer, a group of young Cambodians students and artists. The documentary film Golden Slumbers (Le sommeil d’or) is his first feature length film. It was screened or in competition in over twenty international festivals including Tokyo International Film Festival 2012, Forum of Berlin International Film Festival 2012, Singapore Southeast Asian Film Festival 2013 and Le Festival du Film sur l’Art, Montréal, 2013. Golden Slumbers was released in French theatres on September 2012 and on DVD on April 2013 in France. In 2014, his short film Cambodia 2099 premieres at Cannes International Film Festival at the Directors’ Fortnight.

Soldiers with a mysterious sleeping sickness are transferred to a temporary clinic in a former school. The memory-filled space becomes a revelatory world for housewife and volunteer Jenjira, as she watches over Itt, a handsome soldier with no family visitors. Jen befriends young medium Keng who uses her psychic powers to help loved ones communicate with the comatose men. Doctors explore ways, including colored light therapy, to ease the mens’ troubled dreams. Jen discovers Itt’s cryptic notebook of strange writings and blueprint sketches. There may be a connection between the soldiers’ enigmatic syndrome and the mythic ancient site that lies beneath the clinic. Magic, healing, romance and dreams are all part of Jen’s tender path to a deeper awareness of herself and the world around her.

Director's bio: Apichatpong Weerasethakul is recognised as one of the most original voices in contemporary cinema. His previous six feature films, short films and installations have won him widespread international recognition and numerous awards, including the Cannes Palme d’Or in 2010 with Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives. His Tropical Malady won the Cannes Competition Jury Prize in 2004 and Blissfully Yours won the Cannes Un Certain Regard Award in 2002. Syndromes and a Century(2006) was recognised as one of the best films of the last decade in several 2010 polls.

Born in Bangkok, Apichatpong grew up in Khon Kaen in north-eastern Thailand. He began making films and video shorts in 1994 and completed his first feature in 2000. He has also mounted exhibitions and installations in many countries since 1998 and is now recognised as a major international visual artist. His art prizes include the Sharjah Biennial Prize (2013) and the prestigious Yanghyun Art Prize (2014) in South Korea. Lyrical and often fascinatingly mysterious, his film works are non-linear, dealing with memory and in subtle ways invoking personal politics and social issues.

Curators' bios:Merv Espina (b. 1982, Manila) was raised between Brunei and Manila. This gave him the opportunity to shuttle between the Philippines and North Borneo in the first decade of his life. He moved to Manila for secondary schooling and university studies in philosophy, film and literature. He is a cultural worker who has consistently and reluctantly been working under the titles of “researcher,” “artist” and “curator” for the past decade. His interdisciplinary projects and social experiments have incorporated performances, publications, installations, interventions, festivals, photography, video, sound and radio broadcasts that try to engage different public spheres. In 2010, he co-founded the experimental workgroup plataporma, which immediately took on a commission by the Lopez Museum (Manila) on the occasion of its 50th anniversary to explore the geographic, institutional and popular histories of the museum. He is also the main proponent of Generation Loss which explored the development of film and video in Southeast Asia (Green Papaya Art Projects, 2012). He is currently the curator for video and new media at Green Papaya Art Projects, Manila, and the initiator of iLL (the institute of Lower Learning) with Vanessa Le in Saigon.​

Curated by Merv Espina & Shireen Seno, ManilaVarious directors—67 min

The Kalampag Tracking Agency is a curatorial and organizational collaboration between Shireen Seno and Merv Espina. Overcoming institutional and personal lapses to give attention to little-seen works—some quite recent, some surviving loss and decomposition—this program collects loose parts in motion, a series of bangs, or kalampag in Tagalog, assembled by their individual strengths and how they might resonate off each other and a contemporary audience. Featuring some of the most striking films and videos from the Philippines and its diaspora, this initiative continues to navigate the uncharted topographies of Filipino alternative and experimental moving image practice from the past 30 years.

CLICK ON THE STILLS TO LEARN MORE ABOUT EACH SHORT FILM AND THEIR DIRECTORS!

Shireen Seno was born to a Filipino family in Japan, where she spent most of her childhood. She received an Honours B.A. from the University of Toronto with a double major in Architectural Studies and Cinema Studies. One of four artists selected for plantingrice.com's SPROUT project, she had her first solo exhibit, Mystery Terrain, at Republikha Gallery in January 2012 and followed up with Wild Grass in November 2012 at Light & Space Contemporary.

She started out in film shooting stills for Lav Diaz and went on to direct her first feature-length film, Big Boy (89 min, Super 8, color), which premiered at the International Film Festival Rotterdam 2013, was the opening film of Hors Pistes Tokyo, organized by the Centre Pompidou, and has screened in festivals including Jeonju (South Korea), Edinburgh (UK), New Horizons (Poland), 3 Continents (France), at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts (San Francisco), the German Historical Museum (Berlin), among others. Big Boy won the prize for la Mejor Ópera Prima (Best First Film) at the Festival de Cine Lima Independiente (Perú). Her latest film project, Nervous Translation, was one of 15 projects selected for Venice’s Biennale College Cinema in 2013 and was a recipient of a grant from the Hubert Bals Fund.

A young girl, raised alone by her overprotective father sequestered in their home in Vientiane, Chanthaly suspects that her dead mother's ghost is trying to deliver a message to her from the afterlife. After a change in the medication treating her hereditary heart condition causes the hallucinations to cease, Chanthaly must decide whether or not to risk succumbing to her terminal illness to hear her mother's last words. Chanthaly was screened at Cannes in 2014 and will be having its San Francisco premiere at I-SEA Film Festival.

Director's bio: Born in Los Angeles to recent immigrant parents who left during the communist revolution in Laos, Mattie Do returned to Vientiane in 2010 with her husband and whippet to take care of her retired father. Noting that Lao-language films were scarce and that few featured strong female protagonists or stories, she became determined to make a feature film.

Phong grew up in a small town in the center of Vietnam - the youngest of six children. From the time he was a young boy, Phong felt like he was a girl with a mismatched boy's body. Not until he moved to Hanoi to attend university at age 20 did Phong discover that he was not the only one in the world with this predicament. His dream to 'find himself' by physically changing sex becomes a reality several years later. The movie follows Phong's struggle during these years, with excerpts from his intimate video journal, along with his encounters with family, friends and doctors - all of whom must come to terms with the boy's determination to become a complete girl.

Directors' bios:Swann Dubus (b.1977, France) studied literature and cinema in Paris III university and completed a PhD about intimacy in cinema. He has been filming and directing documentary films since 2000. Swann has worked in both Europe, Africa and Asia. He now lives and works in Hanoi, Vietnam. Filmography includes:

With or without me (documentary, 80′) DOK Leipzig 2011, Torino IFF 2011, DMZ Doc Korea (winner of the international competition)

Finding Phong (documentary, 92′)​

​Tran Phuong Thao (b,1977, Vietnam) initially studied foreign trade and interpretation in Hanoi , but in 2001 she moved to France to fulfill her ambition of becoming a professional filmmaker. She acquired her Masters in Documentary Directing at the Université de Poitiers, France in 2004. She now lives and works in Hanoi.Filmography includes:

Cambodian Son follows Kosal Khiev, a volatile yet charming and talented young man who struggles to find his footing amongst a new freedom that was granted only through his deportation. Armed only with memorized verses, he must face the challenges of being a deportee while navigating his new fame as Phnom Penh’s premiere poet.

Director's bio: Born in Osaka, Japan, Masahiro Sugano, a Sundance Film Festival alumni, is an award-winning filmmaker whose accolades stretch from a Student Academy Award nomination in 1997 to his most recent award as the 2013 grant recipient for Center for Asian American Media’s Innovation Fund for his experimental web series titled VERSES IN EXILE. His recent short film Why I Write (2011) won the Best Poem Performance on Film award at the 2012 Berlin Zebra Poetry Festival. He currently resides in Phnom Penh Cambodia where he has completed his second feature length film project, CAMBODIAN SON (2014).